Searching for a Role Model

I guess I first starting wondering about this issue while I was enjoying the Shanghai Auto Show this past winter.  And now you are wondering what I was perplexed about, was it how the country can afford to have some many models of cars?  Or why there are so many car manufactures in China?  Or how can a low income economy sustain such a huge industry?  Or how is it that they have the highest number of Rolls Royces, Astin Martins, Bentleys and Ferraris?  Good guess but actually this was not high on my mind, rather it was how do they find so many very tall Chinese Models (beautiful girls).  And let me just say that there were more pictures being taken of the models than there were of the cars (by far!). 

So although I know there are millions of Chinese on the streets everyday, I have yet to see a tall woman on the street.  So I asked one of my colleagues if they were actually from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan or some other Asian country.  He let me know that China is very proud of their “Models” and that the Shanghai Motor Show was all about the Chinese Models!!  Only the Ferrari stand was allowed to have Italian girls. 

But after I obviously insulted my colleague with this question I dare not ask where they grow them this tall.  Well they actually  borrowed a system from the Japanese.  Yes the Sumu wrestler system.  Now the two couldn’t look any more different but actually the methods are similar.  So come to find out, the girls are identified at and early age for their beauty and for their apparent capability of growing tall and are “Breed” this way.  Now as you can imagine, things can change so the Chinese have invented a procedure to cope with that as well.  Believe it or not, they have invented a surgery just for this purpose.  If you are a bit queasy then stop reading now.  They actually go in and saw the leg bones apart being careful not to cut into the bone marrow and then add steel “stretchers” to their legs and continue to pull the bones apart as the bone re-heals.  This can add as much as 4 inches to their height and is becoming a popular elective surgery.  So why are the tall girls preferred?  I think it is that the Chinese culture tries to model itself after the US culture in many ways and this is one of them.  They like the look of the tall American models but they prefer the Chinese culture, therefore there is a growing demand for this “LOOK” in a Chinese model. 

This type of surgery is gaining in popularity, and cosmetic surgery is becoming more popular as the middle class emerges.  The most popular cosmetic surgery is the Eye Lift, giving their eyes more of a American/ European look; this is followed by the nose lift and then by the breast augmentation.  I guess this should not be surprising but I must say I WAS SHOCKED!

So I think we all know that the Chinese are great at copying most everything but I never really thought that they would go this far!   I must say that it is very interesting to watch the culture grow at an alarming rate.  I guess if we were in their position and had the means to grow at such a fast pace and really did not know how to do I,t then we too would probably start off by copying the traditions of others.  They should be able to pick the good things of each culture and establish themselves as the best of everything but I see that they want to grow big overnight and that mean cutting corners (I eluded to this issue in my previous blog entries).  So as they continue to “SEARCH FOR A ROLE MODEL” I am sure we will see them slowly loose their own Chinese culture as they scramble for success but I just hope one day that they look back, remember who they were, and where they came from and restore some of the great things about the Chinese Heritage.  The one thing that I hope they do not loose is the “FAMILY”.  Today it really is the most important thing and even if they have nothing they are happy because the family is strong. 

Culture or Tradition?

Like with so many things here in China, it is often hard to determine where tradition ends   and culture begins.  This seems to be the case with my most recent learning experience.  It all started when I decided that I needed to try to change the company (and maybe the country) culture to be able to inspire creativity and innovation.  Now this may seem like an impossible job, and I must say that I agree.  So this issue has consumed much of my waking thoughts and I have recently come up with some tangible / creative ways to try to do this.  I believe that to be able to inspire creativity, the people have to see it in there everyday life.  Now this is so far from reality that it becomes difficult to envision how to start.  As Tommy may remember this was also my topic of discussion at Kalamazoo College when I asked the question of the facility: how do you teach passion and creativity; two values which I believe set people apart from others.  As you can imagine; there fell an eerie silence for what felt like eternity until finally the president uttered some meaningless crap about setting high standards for achievement.  But to their credit they took this comment to heart and within one year they had revised the curriculum to enable students to follow their passion more effectively.  So what does all this have to do with my situation in China, well I am trying to answer the same question that the faculty of Kzoo college faced all those years ago, What is creativity and how does it become part of ones DNA? 
So off I headed to the board of directors meeting to convince them that this was the primary principal need for the transition to a creative, sustainable, organization.  Now I had to make it look like I knew the answer to this and more other perplexing questions because after all, this is why they hired me.  So my game plan was this, as simple as it may seem, Make Innovation visible in the employee’s everyday life.  My approach was simple, put unique examples of innovation where every employee had to experience it; yes;;; revise the lobby to add an innovative centerpiece on which we can display things from everyday life that go against normal thinking.  And with this in mind we should also be able to transform the impression of visitors from OH WHAT A NICE LOBBY to WOW THIS COMPANY THINKS INNOVATION.  So I have gathered a couple of examples that help display this lateral thinking and innovation and the next step is to make the lobby transition happen.
So by now (if you are still reading) you are wondering where all this is going.  Well my issue actually buts itself head-on with tradition and the unique teachings of Buddha.  OK you give up? How can this be? And no we don’t have a Buddha statue in the lobby.  But what we do have is a wall which goes almost all the way across the lobby in front of the elevators.  The problem is that this wall will need to move in order to transform the lobby.  But this as I am finding out, goes against tradition.  Come to find out, this wall is a necessary part of every office building and not because it is structural but rather because it "prevents the money from flowing out of the company".  How does this happen; well that is a mystery of the Buddha tradition.  The reasoning seems to have been lost in the generations but the belief is alive and well.  This becomes even more unsettling when we realize that although there are many Buddha temples in the country, the vast majority does not practice any known religion. But nevertheless, the tradition is an important part of office life.
Seeing that this intrigued me, I decided to explore this a bit further; and lo and behold, these types of features seem to be part of the fen sway china culture.  We find that these features, feature predominately in the architecture of the traditional Chinese house.  As you enter the house, it is bad if you can see from the front door through to the back door.  In addition, it is also not appropriate to be able to see the actual toilet when you open the bathroom door.  We find yet another example of this in the bedroom where you should not be able to see the bed when you enter the room.  So surveying our place, it is very evident that we do not live in a traditional Chinese house as none of these architectural features figure predominately in our flat's architecture.  But then it really does not offend us but we really don’t have good fen sway. 
So tradition lives on in Shanghai even though outward signs have now all been replaced by huge skyscrapers and sprawling suburbia. 

The state of affairs

Well, if there was ever doubt about why I am here (and there was), I may have finally found my place in the evolutionary process of Yanfeng China. 

The more I learn and the more I discover, the more I see parallels between this society and our society of the 1980’s.  I guess this should not be too surprising but it was to me.  When you survey the town of Shanghai it gives the outward appearance that it is one of the most advanced cities in the world; and from an architectural standpoint, it is. But upon closer investigation you notice that the intent is there, the materials are excellent, but they seem to stop short of making the most of these two elements.  It seems that the detail gets lost in the fury of activity. For instance, the buildings are visual candy but to work in one is another story.  It seems that they forgot to learn about insulation and sealing techniques.  In the winter, the buildings remain cold and drafty because they are not insulated and the wind blows through the gaps in the windows and floors.  But it doesn’t end here; this seems to be a cultural attribute.  We see it in the beautiful new metro system where the floors and walls and beautiful marble but before laying the stone they let them become water stained and it really spoils an other wise perfect execution of the subway station.  You see this flaw everywhere. 

And as you can guess, it doesn’t end with the construction trades; it permeates our organization as well.  Surprisingly enough, the company seems to have found ways to plug holes effectively enough to actually produce high quality products.  They seem to use a method of try something until you get it right.  They also have a good system of peer (or expert) reviews in which the experts point out flaws (over and over again!) and the team fixes them.  I assume this type of development process has evolved from the fact that the labor rate is low and the education process, until recent years, has not been up to world standards; So just throw labor at it!  This is what I call the “Trial and Error” stage of development.  It has only been in the past few years that management has had time to take a break from “expert reviews” and move into the prevention phase.    As Issac Newton said: “intelligent people fix problems, geniuses prevent them”.  So , although the company seems to have developed a way to “get things done” when it comes to a production program; the opposite is true when it comes to developing new innovations.  I attribute this to the fact that in a production program the deliverables and time tables are well defined and therefore some sort of process evolves to enable the team to deliver.  But unlike the production program, the development of new ideas does not come with a timetable nor deliverables to which people are expected to perform.  So maybe this is where I came in.

As I mentioned earlier in this ramble, I compare this state of evolution to the USA in the 80’s; before Demming’s design of experiments, before Kaizan, before Six Sigma and before process control.   So in the past 30 years the Japanese and the Germans have helped the USA move from complacency to world class competitors. They have forced us to do this by paying attention to the customers and to the execution of the details (or a focus on craftsmanship).  In order to do this, the US implemented what I will call “Process Control”  So I do I fit into this picture? 

So over the past three months I have struggled to understand the current state of development and figure out how I can be of the most help and support to my colleagues.  Although my ultimate task is to deliver innovations, my real task is to instigate an organizational culture change.  The problem here is that, as mentioned above, there are no rules and no guidelines as this happened naturally over time in the USA.  But like everything else, the Chinese are evolving at an un-natural rate (or trying to).  This is obviously enabled by the financially enabled culture (thanks to the USA).  So, where do you start?  For me, I decided to force evolution to happen.  I set up plans for development just to have a place to focus our efforts.  And so far, it seems to be working; but this is unfortunately because they were looking for someone to just tell them what to do (back to the normal state).  But one day recently it became obvious as to why I was really here:  During one of our many discussions, one of my colleagues hit the nail on the head when he said:  Please teach us how to do THINGS! Because you know how to do THINGS!  After delving into this statement a bit further, I discovered the real issue: They really don’t know how to DO THINGS!  What things you might wonder,,.. just things.  So this is where I am really helping the organization take the next step in the evolutionary process.  It has been great to see how hungry they are for this discipline.  So I gave them just three basic questions to answer before they DO ANYTHING! 

1) What do you want to learn?

2) How are you going to learn it?

3) How will you apply what you learn?

And remember: You don’t know what you don’t know!

So with these simple questions in mind, they are starting to create work plans to support there programs…… WA_LA!  We are off to a good start.

To Be Continued:::::::::::

The Lupu bridge walk

Fortunately we have done a pretty good job of sightseeing in Shanghai because the weather now is getting hot and making sightseeing more difficult. With that in mind we decided to take on our next adventure in the early morning, this way hoping to miss most of the crowd and the hot weather as well. 

Ever since we left Sydney for the last I had wished we had taken the time to take the climb across the Sydner Harbour Bridge, well it might not be Sydney but Shanghai harbor is not a bad second choice.  So after hearing about the possibility of getting  a birds eye view of the Shanghai waterfront area, I could not pass up the opportunity to climb the Lupu Bridge. It is the largest “arch bridge” in the world.  Actually in building the bridge, they had to build huge pillars in the middle of the river as until the arch is completed, it cannot support its own weight.  Then of course once the bridge is finished, the pillars are removed and the bridge settled 300mm to its final resting location.  Although the bridge is not located right downtown, there is a good view of the sprawling city from the top of the bridge.

Our adventure actually started before we got to the bridge.  As I scouted out our route, I noticed that an underground stop was located right next to the bridge entrance, so off went.  Once we neared the bridge we had only one more change to make from line 8 to line 13.  As we exited line 8 we searched for signs to line 13 but could not find any so we proceeded to the ticket booth to ask for help.  Fortunately there was a very helpful young woman there that spoke English and she informed us that line 13 was closed, and subsequently we found out that line 13 was constructed for the Shanghai expo in 2010 and had since been closed.  No problem we were close so we decided to set out on foot.  After exiting the subway station the route was easy; we were going to a bridge so just head for the water.  Well most of you have never been in Shanghai but you will come to discover that you can be less than 100 yards from the river and not be able to see it.  So we headed to an open area to see if we could get a better view and after 10 minutes we were no closer to finding the river so we decided to check the map and lo and behold we were travelling in the exact opposite direction and we were still quite a ways from the bridge.  So not wanting to use all our energy walking (before the strenuous climb), we took a cab and we were glad we did as it still took us 15 minutes to get there.  When we finally arrived we approached the ticket booth to find a note in Chinese taped to the door, our hearts sunk, after all we had been through we really wanted to enjoy the climb.  Fortunately the security guard saw how perplexed we were and lead us to the “real” ticket booth and after purchasing our tickets we were on our way to the top of the bridge.

 The climb is actually very safe as they have built stairs all the way up and over the bridge arch.  So our journey began by taking the elevator up 15 floors to the HEIGHT OF THE ROAD!!.  From there it was a mere 347 steps to the top of the arch and onto the viewing platform. The climb was not as strenuous as we had anticipated and we reached the top in about 15 minutes.  There we were surprised by the fact that there were only 3 other people there, now this is really rare for Shanghai.  We met a guy from Germany and enjoyed talking about our mutual experiences in Shanghai.  The views from the top were great and although it was hazy (which it always is), we enjoyed the sights of downtown Shanghai and the expo center.  The visit was great and should be a stop on your sightseeing visit to Shanghai as long as you are not afraid of heights.

It seems that every outing Shanghai is still an ADVENTURE!  But I guess that is what we came for!

Venice?

Well no not exactly Venice but a very interesting “Water Town”.  It is actually one of the many water towns in the Shanghai area.  Here we get a glimpse of a “real” Chinese town (as opposed to the “surreal” Shanghai experience).  Just after arriving in ZhuJiaJiao, we were greeted by this wonderful street vendor selling amongst other things; live chickens.  Although rarely seen in Shanghai, it is a common site in the more rural areas.  We do actually have a “wet market” just up the road from our place that also sells live chickens amongst many other live fish and other interesting meat sources.

Actually the town was very interesting, albeit very crowded.  It is about a 1 hour drive from our place into the country side.  This is a very ancient city which is now a popular destination for the local population (more than the expat community).  It is like a little Venice as it really is built on a small waterway.  There are many interesting shops selling everything Chinese and many restaurants but we opted for a nice place in a very up market country club in a nearby town. 

We were with our good friends (and boss) who speak pretty good Chinese so we were able to take a “Gondola ride” (Chinese Style), and visit a Buddhist Temple.  The weather was great and we really enjoyed a great day out in “Old China”.  It was nice to experience life in the “good old days”.

More pics on Picasa

Toys

Man cannot live without toys!  At least that is the case for me.  I have now accumulated enough toys to make life in Shanghai a lot more enjoyable.  It is also nice that acquiring toys enable friendships.  A great example of this is my car picture here.  It is a slot car and I was invited by a colleague at work to join his club.  We race once a week at a Japanese colleague’s house where he has converted his living room into a race track.  Last weekend I became a threat.  Although I have only two race days under my belt, last week I took second place overall and had the fastest lap time.  It was nice to be competitive in a new sport.

Making new friends has been slow and difficult as friendships with people at work are difficult and without kids this time, we do not have intimate contact with the international community.  But recently we have been to two dinners, a lunch and a BBQ all with different friends.  We are also starting to meet people at church so as you can tell, life is becoming a lot more fun.

We have heard a lot about the really hot and humid weather coming and so of course I had to get another toy to help cope with the hot weather (which I really don’t like).  So as you can see pictured below, I now have a “cool” way to get around town, an electric bike.  Cath does fit on the back and we have recently used it to go to one of our favorite stores that is just a bit too long of a walk.  I think we will make good use of it this summer.

And my last toy was actually my first toy, my RC car.  It is also a lot of fun and I regularly race it around our complex.  Actually I think I have spent more time repairing it than using it but that is part of the learning experience.  I have broken two wheels and the front steering mechanism but now I can actually have two or three good outings before I break something else.  All the kids in our complex want to try it but it is very very fast and even I have had a hard time controlling it so for now I have to be the “bad neighbor”.

It now feels a lot more comfortable here and I am now enjoying the experience.  The transition was hard but from those I have talked to, this is not uncommon.  Many times we have to remind ourselves that this “is not Kansas” and we now say “TIC” (This is China), and certainly we are not going to change the culture or the way of life here.  Accepting and coping are two key attributes that come in handy here. 

We hope that many of you will use our time here to come and visit because this really is a great country and we can help you experience the local culture and sites. 

Economics 101 take 2

Although I never took an economics class I will try to give you a glimpse into the China economy and how it works.  For the past 30 years the China economy has been a direct result of their low wages and export opportunity.  As I am sure you know, they have really exploited this advantage to the point where the country was foreign cash rich.  So how do you keep your money and investment in your own country, you make your currency a soft currency making it worthless outside the country and then control how much is allowed to be converted and for what reason.  Anytime you want to buy a good or service outside the country you have to apply to the government to be allowed to convert the local currency into foreign currency.  You also have to justify why it cannot be purchased inside the country.  So if the government does allow you to purchase a foreign good, then the government keeps track of what the good was and if it sees advantage of producing it inside the country then it gives money to some internal company to copy it for future needs. 

The government also discourages imports and if it needs outside technology then it forces the outside company to build locally in China and to have a Chinese partner.  So if the foreign company then produces a good and popular product, then the government forces the Chinese partner company to produce a similar product to compete with the foreign partner’s product, thus keeping all the profits inside the Chinese company.  So as is the case with my company, you might wonder what happens to the profits, since the companies are not publically owned.  But you also have to realize that once the company becomes of a certain size, the government then takes it over, so as you can see, at some point all the profits go back to the government.  So what happens is that the companies are therefore forced to re-invest in itself so as to “hide” as much of the profit as possible.  This then fuels the economy because it of course purchases goods from other Chinese companies as it is too difficult to send money outside the country. 

The government has also been funding the infrastructure which makes the country more productive and more competitive.  But for the future it must transform itself into a country which sustains its own growth, and therefore it needs a strong middle class.  We are starting to see the emergence of this middle class with the growth in university graduates.  These highly schooled young people are now able to learn quickly and are becoming very technically capable.  This produces more and more people who are now demanding middle class wages and thus growing the middle class.  This will hurt exports but help local economic growth.  There are now more and more entrepreneurs who are starting their own companies and more and more people who are investing in the booming real estate market.

So now that we have the emergence of a middle class, the government will need to turn over control of the companies to the free enterprise system to be able to sustain the growth, this will be a difficult transition.  I say that because the government hierarchy is very powerful and very privileged.  So as the wages rise and China becomes less able to export, it will depend on it’s 30 billion people to earn wages significant enough to be able to continue to grown the economy.  I guess time will tell if this strategy will work but certainly the people are no strangers to hard work and do not seem to think that anyone owes them a living.  The only issue left to overcome is the same issue that I am trying to help them overcome, they have never focused on the future and do not seem to be able to envision what will be needed to compete.  Most people here have always been told what to do and have copied things that were invented in other countries.  The creative culture will have to become part of their DNA if they are truly to be a viable world competitor.